The story of John Berger is the survival and triumph of a shape-shifter. A painter who turned to writing, he became the single most influential commentator on art of our times. A novelist who rejected mainstream fictional forms, he won the Booker Prize in 1972 and used the award to fund Black Panther revolutionaries. A passionate Marxist, he has remained popular throughout the waning of Marxism. An upper-middle-class Englishman, soldier and Londoner, he turned his back on the fizzing metropolis to live in rural France, and so became an authentic internationalist.
This month he turned 90, but he is still possessed of the wolfish mental and physical energy, the bodily charisma, he has always enjoyed. And, happily, a clutch of new books, by and about him, takes us closer to the mystery that is John Berger.
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